Can this Dubai startup revolutionize market research through crowdsourcing?

Late last year, Karim Aly sold his share of Ecobility, the startup he’d co-founded in 2007, against the backdrop of Dubai’s gilded markets. With the ensuing economic crash, the company, a hybrid between a boutique VC and an incubator focused on the clean tech space, took on a “big challenge,” says Aly on a call with Wamda – and a bigger learning experience. “Fighting through the crisis, we were able to build six portfolio companies under Ecobility…. And then in 2012 we were ranked the #1 SME in the UAE by the AllWorld Network,” with a three-year growth rate of 364%.

It’s the experience he gained fighting through the crisis with the tough sell of an eco-friendly startup – and, of course, the windfall he received from selling – that led him to launch his newest venture, Task Spotting, an app that stands to revolutionize how brands in the region conduct market research.

“We created Task Spotting to provide local visibility to businesses that are looking for insights, by connecting them to a smart phone population ready to provide them,” Aly says. The app leverages two important regional developments – a surge in the popularity of crowdsourcing and some of theworld’s highest smartphone penetration rates – to provide real time, geo-tagged and time-stamped market information to companies for which lack of clarity at the point of sale is a pain point.

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Can this Dubai startup revolutionize market research through crowdsourcing?